A comparative survey on the polarimetric SAR data target decomposition techniques

Kurzfassung

The polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) system emits microwaves on two orthogonal polarizations (the most often horizontal and vertical) and receives the backscattered echoes on the same two polarizations to synthesize recordings of the ground scene. The information embeded in the four resulted polarimetric channels fully describes the backscattering properties of the recorded ground objects. In order to take full advantage of this information and to extract the physical properties of the recorded targets, simple false-color representations of the polarimetric channels are not sufficient, so several coherent and incoherent target decomposition theorems have been proposed in the state-of-the-art literature. All these decompositions assume the fact that any scattering mechanism can be represented as the sum of some simpler, ,,canonicalˮ scattering mechanisms. The aim of this paper is to perform a comparative survey on these decomposition techniques and to provide examples using two PolSAR datasets: a L-band PALSAR image over Danube's Delta, Romania, and a C-band RadarSAT2 image over Brăila, Romania.